Thursday, November 20, 2014

Infra-Man (1975)

Something of a
Saturday-matinee fever dream, this strange superhero saga was made by the
prolific Hong Kong company Shaw Brothers, which found most of its success
making martial-arts flicks. And, indeed, kung fu fights find their way into Infra-Man, even though the plot is about
a cyborg battling demons and monsters sent by a mystical princess who emerges
from her underground lair to conquer the surface world. Within the first five minutes of the movie proper (following the credits), a giant dragon falls from the sky
onto a highway, blocking the path of a school bus, and then the dragon
disappears, somehow causing a giant sinkhole that consumes the bus and sparks a
fiery maelstrom that destroys a nearby city. The pace doesn’t stay quite that
frenetic throughout Infra-Man, but
the level of lunacy does.

The first major human character introduced in the
story is Professor De (Wang Hsieh), who runs a massive government science lab.
As a means of telling the audience that the lab is futuristic, the professor
arrives at work wearing street clothes and then changes into a sliver-lame lab
coat festooned with military epaulets. Soon the humans discover that the
culprit behind a series of monster attacks is Princess Dragon Mom (Terry Liu),
who wears some sort of dominatrix outfit and a headdress designed to look like
a dragon skull. From her subterranean HQ, where the attendants include lackeys
garbed in skeleton costumes and assorted indeterminate critters who seem like
they wandered over from a Sid & Marty Kroft soundstage, Princess Dragon Mom
announces her intention to conquer Earth and/or destroy everyone using her
monsters.

To fight back, the professor enlists one of his subordinates, Lei Ma
(Danny Lee), to undergo a high-tech transformation and become the cybernetic
superhero Infra-Man. Lei can transform into Infra-Man at will, so whenever
danger arises, he instantaneously summons a bright red costume with a bug-like
helmet, thereby incarnating a drag-queen’s vision of a Power Ranger.
(Accentuating the presumably unintended gay-chic nature of the character, one of
Infra-Man’s superpowers involves “thunderball fists.”) Endless scenes of
Infra-Man tussling with monsters ensue, and the filmmakers employ zero logic
with regard to what levels of power and/or vulnerability each character
possesses. Sometimes, Infra-Man simply engages in kung fu combat with
human-sized monsters, and sometimes, both Infra-Man and his opponents magically
expand to gigantic proportions.

The creatures in the movie are as silly as the
main character, including some sort of octopus monster, various robotic
henchmen, and myriad mutants portrayed by actors wearing bargain-basement
rubber suits. Further, Princess Dragon Mom seems more like a sexually
frustrated S&M enthusiast than a super-villain, because she spends most of
her time cracking whips and torturing people. Infra-Man borrows the worst possible tropes from Toho Studios’
Godzilla movies, so the professor delivers such insipid lines as, “Lieutenant,
I’m going to need printouts on these monsters!” (Because, of course, detailed
files are available on monsters previously unseen by man.) And yet the
professor’s line can’t compare to some of Princess Dragon Mom’s dialogue (e.g., “She-Demon, I wish to speak to the mutants at once!”).

All of this is
made so much weirder, of course, by the horrible soundtrack of the movie’s
English-language version, which features, in addition to the predictable out-of-sync dubbing, a motif
of a monster laughing and scheming in a gravely voice reminiscent of
Depression-era American gangster movies.